Feng Chen

Associate Professor
Mr. and Mrs. C. W. Armstrong, Jr. Professor of Engineering

Division of Computer Science and Engineering
LSU, School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
3272-L Patrick F. Taylor Hall
Baton Rouge, LA 70803

Email: fchen@csc eml
Phone: (225) 578-0737
Fax: (225) 578-1465

About me

I am an Associate Professor at Division of Computer Science and Engineering, Louisiana State University. I received my Ph.D. and M.S. degrees at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, The Ohio State University in 2010 and 2009. I received my M.E. and B.E. degrees at Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Zhejiang University in 2003 and 2000. Before joining LSU, I was a research scientist with Circuits and Systems Research, Intel Labs. I am a recipient of NSF CAREER Award in 2015.

To prospective students: If you are interested in opportunities of working on many exciting topics in systems research, please send me your recent CV and transcripts.

Awards and Honors

Mr. and Mrs. C. W. Armstrong, Jr. Professorship of Engineering, 2020.
LSU Alumni Association Rising Faculty Research Award, 2018.
Tiger Athletic Foundation Undergraduate Teaching Award, 2016.
Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award, NSF, 2015.
Division Recognition Award, Circuits and Systems Research, Intel Labs, 2013.
Best Paper Award, ACM International Conference on Supercomputing, 2011.

Teaching

CSC 7800: Research Seminar (Fall 2016-17, Spring 2022, Fall 2023-24)
CSC 7700: Advanced Storage Systems (Spring 2018-19, 2021, 2023)
CSC 7103: Advanced Operating Systems (Fall 2015-24)
CSC 4103: Operating Systems (Fall 2014, 2021, Spring 2014-17, 2019-21, 2023-24)
CSC 3200: Ethics in Computing (Fall 2019, 2021, 2023)

Research Interests (Wordle)

Operating systems
Storage systems
Databases and data stores
Cloud and distributed systems

My main research interests are in systems areas, focusing on storage systems, databases, and data-intensive application systems. My research covers a broad scope from optimizing cache and memory management in OS kernel, creating high-speed flash and disk based storage, enhancing user experience on cloud storage, to improving power efficiency for mobile and small-form-factor devices. Despite the diversity of these studies, there is a core common theme—They are all about data, the new "gold" in this digital era. My more recent interests are in key-value cache and NoSQL databases, computational storage, and memory-based data stores.

Publications (Full list, Google Scholar Page)

Five Most Cited Publications

Feng Chen, David Koufaty, and Xiaodong Zhang, "Understanding Intrinsic Characteristics and System Implications of Flash Memory based Solid State Drives", Proceedings of 2009 ACM SIGMETRICS Conference on Measurement and Modeling of Computer Systems (SIGMETRICS/Performance'09), Seattle, WA, June 15-19, 2009. (Cited by 726).

Feng Chen, Tian Luo, and Xiaodong Zhang, "CAFTL: A Content-Aware Flash Translation Layer Enhancing the Lifespan of Flash Memory based Solid State Drives", Proceedings of the 9th USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies (FAST'11), San Jose, CA, February 15-17, 2011. (Cited by 425).

Feng Chen, Rubao Lee, and Xiaodong Zhang, "Essential Roles of Exploiting Internal Parallelism of Flash Memory based Solid State Drives in High-Speed Data Processing", Proceedings of the 17th International Symposium on High Performance Computer Architecture (HPCA'11), San Antonio, Texas, February 12-16, 2011. [Journal Version] (Cited by 405).

Feng Chen, David Koufaty, and Xiaodong Zhang, "Hystor: Making the Best Use of Solid State Drives in High Performance Storage Systems", Proceedings of the 25th ACM International Conference on Supercomputing (ICS'11), Tucson, Arizona, May 31-June 4, 2011. (Cited by 366). Best Paper Award

Hystor has made impact on commercial hybrid storage products, including Apple's Fusion Drive (See more details).

Song Jiang, Feng Chen, and Xiaodong Zhang, "CLOCK-Pro: An Effective Improvement of the CLOCK Replacement", Proceedings of 2005 USENIX Annual Technical Conference (USENIX ATC'05), Anaheim, CA, April 10-15, 2005, pp.323-336. (Cited by 359).

CLOCK-Pro has been adopted in OS kernel and other data management systems (See more details).

Recent and Selected Publications

Kecheng Huang, Zhaoyan Shen, Zili Shao, Tong Zhang, and Feng Chen, "Breathing New Life into An Old Tree: Resolving Logging Dilemma of B+-tree on Modern Computational Storage Drives", Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment, Vol. 17, No. 2, October, 2023. To be presented at the 50th International Conference on Very Large Data Bases (VLDB'24), Guangzhou, China, August 26-30, 2024.

Kefei Wang, and Feng Chen, "Catalyst: Optimizing Cache Management for Large In-memory Key-value Systems", Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment, Vol. 16, No. 13, pp. 4339-4352, September 2023. To be presented at the 50th International Conference on Very Large Data Bases (VLDB'24), Guangzhou, China, August 26-30, 2024.

Kecheng Huang, Zhaoyan Shen, Zhiping Jia, Zili Shao, and Feng Chen, "Removing Double-Logging with Passive Data Persistence in LSM-tree based Relational Databases", Proceedings of the 20th USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies (FAST'22), Santa Clara, CA, February 22-24, 2022.

Jian Liu, Kefei Wang, and Feng Chen, "TSCache: An Efficient Flash-based Caching Scheme for Time-series Data Workloads", Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment, Vol. 14, No. 13, pp. 3253-3266, September 2021. Presented at the 48th International Conference on Very Large Data Bases (VLDB'22), Sydney, Australia, September 5-9, 2022.

Jian Liu, Kefei Wang, and Feng Chen, "Understanding Energy Efficiency of Databases on Single Board Computers for Edge Computing", Proceedings of the 29th International Symposium on Modeling, Analysis, and Simulation of Computer and Telecommunication Systems (MASCOTS'21), Houston, TX, November 2-4, 2021.

Kecheng Huang, Zhiping Jia, Zhaoyan Shen, Zili Shao, and Feng Chen, "Less is More: De-amplifying I/Os for Key-value Stores with a Log-assisted LSM-Tree", Proceedings of the 37th IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE'21), Chania, Greece, April 19-22, 2021.

Binbing Hou, and Feng Chen, "A Study on Nine Years of Bitcoin Transactions: Understanding Real-world Behaviors of Bitcoin Miners and Users", Proceedings of the 40th IEEE International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS'20), Singapore, November 29-December 1, 2020.

Yichen Jia, and Feng Chen, "Kill Two Birds with One Stone: Auto-tuning RocksDB for High Bandwidth and Low Latency", Proceedings of the 40th IEEE International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS'20), Singapore, November 29-December 1, 2020.

Yichen Jia, and Feng Chen, "From Flash to 3D XPoint: Performance Bottlenecks and Potentials in RocksDB with Storage Evolution", Proceedings of the 2020 IEEE International Symposium on Performance Analysis of Systems and Software (ISPASS'20), Boston, MA, August 23-26, 2020.

Kefei Wang, Jian Liu, and Feng Chen, "Put an Elephant into a Fridge: Optimizing Cache Efficiency for In-memory Key-value Stores", Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment, Vol. 13, No. 9, pp. 1540-1554, May 2020. Presented at the 46th International Conference on Very Large Data Bases (VLDB'20), Tokyo, Japan, August 31-September 4, 2020.

Jian Liu, Kefei Wang, and Feng Chen, "Reo: Enhancing Reliability and Efficiency of Object-based Flash Caching", Proceedings of the 39th IEEE International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS'19), Dallas, TX, July 7-10, 2019.

Zhaoyan Shen, Feng Chen, Gala Yadgar, and Zili Shao, "One Size Never Fits All: A Flexible Storage Interface for SSDs", Proceedings of the 39th IEEE International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS'19), Dallas, TX, July 7-10, 2019. [Journal Version]

Yichen Jia, Eric Anger, and Feng Chen, "When NVMe over Fabrics Meets Arm: Performance and Implications", Proceedings of the 35th IEEE International Conference on Massive Storage Systems and Technology (MSST'19), Santa Clara, CA, May 20-24, 2019.

Kefei Wang, and Feng Chen, "Cascade Mapping: Optimizing Memory Efficiency for Flash-based Key-value Caching", Proceedings of the 9th ACM Symposium on Cloud Computing 2018 (SoCC'18), Carlsbad, CA, October 11-13, 2018.

Binbing Hou, and Feng Chen, "Pacaca: Mining Object Correlations and Parallelism for Enhancing User Experience with Cloud Storage", Proceedings of the 26th IEEE International Symposium on the Modeling, Analysis, and Simulation of Computer and Telecommunication Systems (MASCOTS'18), Milwaukee, WI, September 25-28, 2018.

Yichen Jia, Zili Shao, and Feng Chen, "SlimCache: Exploiting Data Compression Opportunities in Flash-based Key-value Caching", Proceedings of the 26th IEEE International Symposium on the Modeling, Analysis, and Simulation of Computer and Telecommunication Systems (MASCOTS'18), Milwaukee, WI, September 25-28, 2018. [Journal Version]

Feng Chen, Tong Zhang, Xiaodong Zhang, "Software Support Inside and Outside Solid-State Devices for High Performance and High Efficiency", Proceedings of the IEEE, Vol. 105, No. 9, pp. 1650-1665, September 2017.

Dejun Teng, Lei Guo, Rubao Lee, Feng Chen, Siyuan Ma, Yanfeng Zhang, and Xiaodong Zhang, "LSbM-tree: Re-enabling Buffer Caching in Data Management for Mixed Reads and Writes", Proceedings of the 37th IEEE International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS'17), Atlanta, GA, June 5-8, 2017. [Journal Version]

Zhaoyan Shen, Feng Chen, Yichen Jia, and Zili Shao, "DIDACache: A Deep Integration of Device and Application for Flash-based Key-value Caching", Proceedings of the 15th USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies (FAST'17), Santa Clara, CA, February 27-March 2, 2017. [Journal Version]

Binbing Hou, Feng Chen, Zhonghong Ou, Ren Wang, Michael Mesnier, "Understanding I/O Performance Behaviors of Cloud Storage from a Client's Perspective", Proceedings of the 32nd International Conference on Massive Storage Systems and Technology (MSST'16), Santa Clara, CA, May 2-6, 2016. [Journal Version]

Jace Courville, Feng Chen, "Understanding Storage I/O Behaviors of Mobile Applications", Proceedings of the 32nd International Conference on Massive Storage Systems and Technology (MSST'16), Santa Clara, CA, May 2-6, 2016.

Feng Chen, Michael Mesnier, and Scott Hahn, "A Protected Block Device for Persistent Memory", Proceedings of the 30th International Conference on Massive Storage Systems and Technology (MSST'14), Santa Clara, CA, June 2-6, 2014 (Acceptance Rate 18.5%, 23/124). [Software: PMBD source code]

Feng Chen, Michael Mesnier, and Scott Hahn, "Client-aware Cloud Storage", Proceedings of the 30th International Conference on Massive Storage Systems and Technology (MSST'14), Santa Clara, CA, June 2-6, 2014 (Acceptance Rate 18.5%, 23/124).

Tian Luo, Rubao Lee, Michael Mesnier, Feng Chen, and Xiaodong Zhang, "hStorage-DB: Heterogeneity-aware Data Management to Exploit the Full Capability of Hybrid Storage Systems", Proceedings of the 38th ACM International Conference on Very Large Databases (VLDB'12), Istanbul, Turkey, August 27-31, 2012.

Michael Mesnier, Jason Akers, Feng Chen, and Tian Luo, "Differentiated Storage Services", Proceedings of the 23rd ACM Symposium on Operating System Principles (SOSP'11), Cascais, Portugal, October 23-26, 2011.

Rubao Lee, Xiaoning Ding, Feng Chen, Qingda Lu, and Xiaodong Zhang, "MCC-DB: Minimizing Cache Conflicts in Multi-core Processors for Databases", Proceedings of the 35th International Conference on Very Large Data Bases (VLDB'09), Lyon, France, August 24-28, 2009.

Xiaoning Ding, Song Jiang, Feng Chen, Kei Davis, and Xiaodong Zhang, "DiskSeen: Exploiting Disk Layout and Access History to Enhance I/O Prefetch", Proceedings of 2007 USENIX Annual Technical Conference (USENIX ATC'07), Santa Clara, CA, June 17-22, 2007.

Song Jiang, Xiaoning Ding, Feng Chen, Enhua Tan, and Xiaodong Zhang, "DULO: An Effective Buffer Cache Management Scheme to Exploit Both Temporal and Spatial Localities", Proceedings of the 4th USENIX Conference on Files and Storage Technologies (FAST'05), San Francisco, CA, December 14-16, 2005, pp.101-114. [Journal Version]

Research Impact

CLOCK-Pro (USENIX'05) has been adopted in OS and data management systems (See source code in NetBSD, a LinuxMM article, and more details).

Hystor (ICS'11) has made impact on commercial hybrid storage products, including Apple's Fusion Drive (See a research highlight in CCC, and more details).

PMBD (MSST'14) has made impact on academic research on persistent memory in computing systems (See the source code and more details).

Patents

Feng Chen and Michael Mesnier, "Write Mechanism for Storage Class Memory", Filed Dec. 30, 2011, Published July 4, 2013.

Michael Mesnier, Tian Luo, and Feng Chen, "System and Method for Providing Differentiated Storage Service in a Database", Filed Dec. 29, 2011, Published July 4, 2013.

Software Tools

Persistent memory block driver is now open to the public!

Download the source code.
Here is the PMBD paper and a related talk from Red Hat mentioning PMBD.
A list of publications that used PMBD in the research.

Professional Activities

Program Committee member

IEEE CLOUD'24, EuroSys'24, CLOUD'23, IEEE CLOUD'23, IEEE CLOUD'22, NVMSA'21, IEEE CLOUD'21, ICDCS'21, FAST'21, CLOUD'21, NVMSA'20, USENIX ATC'20, IEEE SMDS'20, IEEE CLOUD'20, CLOUD'20, NVMSA'19, CLOUD'19, HotStorage'19, IEEE CLOUD'19, IEEE EDGE'19, ICDCS'19, NAS'18, SDDCS'18, IEEE CLOUD'18, IEEE EDGE'18, NVMSA'18, ICPADS'17, NVMSA'17, RTCSA'17, CLOUD'17, SDDCS'17, NAS'17, EDGE'17, ICPADS'16, HotPlanet'16, CCIS'16, CLOUD'16, SDDCS'16, NVMSA'16, MobiMedia'16, MSST'15, CLOUD'15, NVMSA'15, SDDCS'15, ICPP'15, NAS'14, RTCSA'13.
Publicity co-chair of NVMSA'16, NVMSA'15.
Session chair of SDDCS'16, NVMSA'15, MSST'15.

Member of Technical Review Board of IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems (TPDS).
Member of Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), IEEE Computer Society, and USENIX Association.
Conference webmaster of ICDCS'08, WWW'08, ICDCS'09.
Invited researcher to the prestigious Intel Science Talent Search (2012).

Peer Review and Referee

Conferences/Workshops

IEEE CLOUD'24, EuroSys'24, ICDE'24, CLOUD'23, IEEE CLOUD'23, IEEE CLOUD'22, NVMSA'21, IEEE CLOUD'21, ICDCS'21, FAST'21, CLOUD'21, NVMSA'20, USENIX ATC'20, IEEE CLOUD'20, IEEE SMDS'20, CLOUD'20, NVMSA'19, HotStorage'19, ICDCS'19, CLOUD'19, IEEE EDGE'19, IEEE CLOUD'19, NAS'18, NVMSA'18, IEEE CLOUD'18, IEEE EDGE'18, ICPADS'17, NVMSA'17, RTCSA'17, CLOUD'17, SDDCS'17, NAS'17, EDGE'17, ICPADS'16, HotPlanet'16, CCIS'16, CLOUD'16, SDDCS'16, NVMSA'16, MobiMedia'16, MSST'15, CLOUD'15, NVMSA'15, ICPP'15, SDDCS'15, HPCA'14, FAST'17, SIGMETRICS'14, PACT'14, NAS'14, MICRO'13, RTCSA'13, PPOPP'12, ICS'12, ICDCS'12, NGN'12, SC'11, NGN'11, IPDPS'11, WWW'10, SC'10, Cluster'10, INFOCOMM'09, SC'09, ICDCS'09, SIGMETRICS'08, SC'08, INFOCOM'07, ICDCS'07, ICPP'06, ICPADS'06.

Journals

ACM Transactions on Storage (TOS), ACM Transactions on Embedded Computing Systems (TECS), ACM Transactions on Design Automation of Electronic Systems (TODAES), IEEE Transactions on Computers (TC), IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering (TKDE), IEEE Transactions on Parallel & Distributed Systems (TPDS), IEEE Transactions on CAD of Integrated Circuits and Systems (TCAD), IEEE Transactions on Emerging Topics in Computing (TETC), IEEE Transactions on Multimedia (MM), IEEE Transactions on Services Computing (TSC), IEEE Transactions on Sustainable Computing (TSUSC), IEEE Transactions on Cloud Computing (TCC), IEEE Transactions on Big Data (TBD), IEEE Transactions on Modeling and Performance Evaluation of Computing Systems (TOMPECS), IEEE Computer Architecture Letters (CAL), IEEE Embedded Systems Letters (ESL), Frontiers of Computer Science (FCS), Journal of Low Power Electronics (JOLPE), Journal of System and Software (JSS), Journal of System Architecture (JSA), Journal of Computer Science and Technology (JCST), Journal of Information Science and Engineering (JISE), Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing (JPDC), Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute Journal (ETRI), Parallel Computing (PARCO).

Research Sponsors

National Science Foundation
Louisiana Board of Regents
Intel Corporation

Research Guide

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